R change $xxx.xx to xxx.xx for both positive and negative numbers but don't round

Question

I have a df where columns 2 and beyond are dollar amounts such as $1004.23, ($1482.40), $2423.94 etc. Similar to the example below:

> df
  id   desc    price
         


        

Answer 1

Another possible solution which builds on your own attempt and takes into account that you need to transform more columns than in the example:

d[,-c(1:2)] <- lapply(d[,-c(1:2)], 
                      function(x) as.numeric(gsub('[$,]', '', sub(")", "", sub("(", "-", x, fixed=TRUE), fixed=TRUE))))

which gives:

> d
  id   desc price price2
1  0  apple  1.00  -5.90
2  1 banana -2.25   2.39
3  2 grapes  1.97  -0.95

Or using a for-loop:

for(i in 3:ncol(d)){
  d[[i]] <- as.numeric(gsub('[$,]', '', sub(")", "", sub("(", "-", d[[i]], fixed=TRUE), fixed=TRUE)))
}

Or using the data.table package:

library(data.table)
cols <- names(d)[-c(1:2)]
setDT(d)[, (cols) := lapply(.SD, function(x) as.numeric(gsub('[$,]', '', sub(")", "", sub("(", "-", x, fixed=TRUE), fixed=TRUE)))),
         .SDcols = cols]

Or using the dplyr package:

library(dplyr)
d %>% 
  mutate_all(funs(as.numeric(gsub('[$,]', '', sub(")", "", sub("(", "-", ., fixed=TRUE), fixed=TRUE)))), -c(1:2))

which will all give you the same result.

---

Used data:

d <- structure(list(id = 0:2, desc = c("apple", "banana", "grapes"), 
                    price = c("$1.00", "($2.25)", "$1.97"), 
                    price2 = c("($5.9)", "$2.39", "($0.95)")),
               .Names = c("id", "desc", "price", "price2"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c("1", "2", "3"))